A blog on crisis communications best practices, emergency information and social media in emergency management ... an open forum for exchanging ideas and experience on emergency info and SMEM..
THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED WITHIN ARE MINE AND DO NOT REPRESENT OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT POLICY OR THE VIEWS OF MY EMPLOYER.

Friday, May 22, 2009

let's get started

Okay ... we can't escape it ... H1N1 ... the swine flu ... how do you think it's been handled so far from a crisis or risk communications perspective ...

DISCLOSURE: I work for the Ontario government ... however, I want to indicate that my views and opinions do NOT reflect official edicts or positions of my ministry (Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services) or EMO (Emergency Management Ontario) or any other provincial ministry or agency ...

Having said that ... what's my take on how the government has dealt with the H1N1 issue?

Let's just say: mixed results ... Lessons from SARS have been learned the hard way ... but still not completely ...

The Ministry of Health and Long-term Care did a good job communicating with the public and stakeholder in the health sectors ... a good job ... not fabulous ... certainly not very inventive and with very little attention to new media ... Now, that might have been enough a few years back when SARS hit ... but can't we do better now ... 6 years later ? with all the tools and social media platforms we have at our disposal ... Still ... they get a passing grade for me ... they did what they had to do ...

Now, the other shoe drops (and I might get some push back on this from people inside the Ontario Public Service ... some highly-placed people !!!) ... we did a DISMAL job on internat comms ...

it took us days ... a week even ... to get the most basic info to our most valuable group of stakeholders ... our own employees across the Ontario Public Service ... things bogged down ...

Question: what's the point of having plans of all sorts to deal with a pandemic, including plans to communicate with every group of stakeholders ... if those plan go out the window at the onset of an emergency ?

There has to be enough trust and buy in into the solidity of our planning for professionals to be able to do their job ... without levels of scrutiny and infighting that slow things down to a crawl ...

Opinions out there ?

Now, there's a way to get started ... I'll let you know next week if I still have a job !!!